Editorial: Head of EPA bemoans ‘weaponization’ of his agency

Under the Constitution the duty of the executive branch of the federal government is to enforce the laws enacted by Congress. Somewhere along the way some presidents and many of their appointed administrators of the various executive branches have lost sight of this distinction and usurped powers not accorded them.

Fortunately this trend appears to be on the decline. Take for example the recent words of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

“We are housed in the Executive Branch, and your job is to enforce the law — the only authority I have is from Congress — largely what has happened with the past administration, they made it up,” Pruitt said in a recent press interview. “The fact that Congress is dysfunctional and is not updating the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act or all of these statutes that we administer, the fact that Congress isn’t doing that doesn’t mean EPA can say, ‘We’re going to do it in your place.’”

He went on to say his agency in the past had “weaponized” its rule making authority to pick and choose winners in the economy. “Weaponized in the sense of saying we are going to favor certain outcomes in the market with respect to energy and the environment — that’s not the role of a regulator,” Pruitt said.

A few days later the head of the EPA visited mining sites in Nevada and continued his rant about the weaponization of rules to prohibit economic activity rather than meet the congressional mandate to keep the air and water clean.

“The agency that I’ve been selected to lead, the last several years has been weaponized. It’s been weaponized against certain sectors of our economy, and yours was one of them,” the Elko newspaper quoted Pruitt as telling 300 miners during a visit to Coeur Mining’s Rochester mine near Lovelock. “Think about that for a second. An agency in Washington, D.C., weaponized against its own sectors of the economy across this country. That’s not the way it should work.”

He said his agency needs to get back to stewardship of the environment rather than issuing prohibitions against certain activity.

Pruitt went on say that his agency would be cooperative with the states in taking commonsense approaches that give the state leeway in making cost-effective decisions — a refreshing return to the concept of federalism.

“We recognized that you in Nevada recognize that you care about the air that you breath, the water you drink and how you take care of your land in the state,” the Elko paper quoted Pruitt as saying. “Having a rule that was punitive, weaponized against the mining sector, was not a reason to have the rule, so we stopped the rule.”

Pruitt’s approach to looking at the facts and the law instead of vague presumptions based on unproven theories is sending the climate change acolytes into paroxysms of apoplexy.

In that earlier interview, he was quoted as saying, “There are things we know and things we don’t know. I think it’s pretty arrogant for people in 2018 to say, ‘We know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100,’” adding that the debate about proper carbon dioxide levels is important but not the most pressing matter in the near future.

We appreciate and applaud the commonsense and constitutional approach enunciated by this member of the executive branch. It is good for the economy, the environment and the country.

Anyone who is ignorant enough to deny the risk of global warming is also ignorant enough to say just about anything the fossil fuel interests want him to say; therefore, his words are not to be trusted. In particular, so far as I can see, he has completely failed to specify just how coal, a fuel that continues to directly contribute to a great many deaths through the pollution of our air, laces our waterways with large quantities of methyl mercury, frequently poisons our waterways through runoff and creates vast tracts of unusable land, has been unfairly singled out. Notice I left out it’s status as the dirtiest possible fuel in terms of global warming for benefit of the flat Earth folks among you.

According to the Washington Post, the entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s – 76, 572, Since we routinely create more than 150,000 new jobs every month in this country, it’s difficult to understand why this now minor industry deserves special protection in light of the damage it causes.. No reason to regulate coal to death anyway. Just get rid of its subsidies and it will die a quiet, natural death on its own. This is because the greatest damage to the coal industry comes not from the EPA, but from cheap natural gas.

This issue that deserves to be a nonissue is another example of fake news polarizing our politics. We owe special thanks to the Koch brothers and their ilk for this.

if this had been a democratic appointee, spending money like a drunken sailor (and on the most unrelated things like a $25,000 “cone of silence”, EPA employees that are intended to function as primary investigators of environmental violators, instead being assigned as body guards, first class airline travel (of course I mean why shouldn’t a republican appointee travel first class right?)) and if instead of meeting with the vey guys, whose industries he was charged to regulate, this administrator was meeting (in Moracco for crying out loud) with a bunch of tree huggers, imagine the outrage from conservatives?

Instead, we get…the above stuff, near cheers to my ears. Crazy world we live in.

“For someone whose entire political career has been built on an animosity to Washington, D.C., Scott Pruitt certainly appears to have enjoyed the past 12 months of federal employ. He has been to Morocco, where he shilled American natural gas. There was also a trip to a golf resort in Naples, Florida, for a meeting of the National Mining Association. And to lovely Kiawah Island, off the South Carolina coast, to join a retreat of the American Chemistry Council. Some bureaucrats may be relegated to the sad desk lunch, but Pruitt is not among them. When executives from a coal company were in town, they took Pruitt to BLT Prime, the restaurant at the Trump International Hotel that is the unofficial clubhouse of the Make America Great Again crowd.”

Well, apparently a message got through and I fear for our environment now because Pruitt cancelled his planned trip to Israel, where I’m sure untold information regarding how the environment in the US could have otherwise been obtained. And surely, that information could not have been obtained unless he went first class, and stayed at the best hotels.

“Pruitt had been scheduled to arrive in Israel on Sunday and remain in Jerusalem until Thursday to meet with officials to discuss Israel’s infrastructure and environmental challenges, the Post reported.
According to Israeli officials who spoke to the newspaper, the EPA head was planning to stay in the storied King David Hotel.”

I thought some here might be interested in the economic impact of regulations, at least major ones, like the ones the EPA is supposed to be enforcing. Does some serious damage to the typical a conservative line though.

“The Trump administration report says that from fiscal 2007 through 2016 the annual economic benefits of major rulemakings reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) were estimated to be between $287 billion and $911 billion.

The report found that from Oct. 1, 2006, to Sept. 30, 2016, the annual benefits of regulations outweighed the annual costs, which were estimated to be between $78 billion and $115 billion in 2015 dollars.”

10 years where the positive annual benefit, to this country’s (minus the annual costs) of between 6 billion and 80 billion dollars per year.

“In December, Pruitt and members of his staff spent about $40,000 in taxpayer funds to fly to Morocco to help encourage the North African kingdom to import liquefied natural gas from the United States. Cheniere, the lobbying client of Hart’s firm, is currently the only exporter of liquefied natural gas from the continental United States.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved a project for the Canadian energy company Enbridge at the same time that EPA chief Scott Pruitt was renting a condominium from the wife of one of the company’s lobbyists for $50 a night, The New York Times reported on Monday.”

I’m asking once again Thomas hoping that you respond with some justification (or more hopefully some condemnation) whether we, as taxpayers, can tolerate this?

”
Mr. Chmielewski told congressional staff members during a meeting this week that Mr. Pruitt would often seek to schedule trips back to Oklahoma, where he still owns a home, so he could stay there for weekends. “Find me something to do,” were the instructions Mr. Pruitt gave his staff, after telling them he wanted to travel to particular destinations, the letter says, quoting Mr. Chmielewski, who was expected to sign off on the trips.

When planning a trip to Italy, Mr. Pruitt “refused to stay at hotels recommended by the U.S. Embassy, although the recommended hotel had law enforcement and other U.S. resources on site,” according to the letter, which was written and sent to Mr. Pruitt, asking him to turn over documents related to the letter’s claims. Instead, Mr. Pruitt chose to stay “at more expensive hotels with fewer standard security resources,” while bringing along his own security team “at taxpayer expense.”

Come on Thomas. Say something about this. I’m starting to lose my faith in the integrity of the right.

“The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) violated the law with its approval to pay for a secure soundproof booth in Administrator Scott Pruitt’s personal office, a federal watchdog said on Monday.

A report by the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) found that Pruitt’s $43,000 “privacy booth” was in violation of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, which caps agency redecorations at $5,000 without prior approval.”

I debated where to put this link; there were so many articles about government transparency, and the public’s right to know and it could have gone there, but after what you’ve said here, maybe not.

So, a soundproof booth, intended to keep the public from knowing the dealings of our government workers is acceptable to you? What secrets do you figure the head of the EPA doesn’t want the public to know? Maybe who he was lobbying for in Morocco?

And Thomas Pruitt isn’t saving the country anything in fact, according to the Trump administrations report, that I linked to here in another article, the very regulations that Pruitt is doing his best to get rid of, are adding billions,and billions of dollars to the economy every year. Forget that his actions are making a disaster of the environment, just economically they’re hurting the country.

Pruitt upgraded his official car last June from the traditional Chevrolet Tahoe SUV to a higher-end Chevy Suburban with bullet-resistant covers over the car’s bucket seats, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The new car was ordered last May and cost the government $10,200 for a one-year lease, according to federal spending records. Records show that EPA requested upgrades to the vehicle which included Wi-Fi, GPS navigation, second-row bucket seats and a leather interior. The upgrades were an additional $300 per month.”

This EPA stuff is dangerous work, he probably “deserves” this anyhow. Might Thomas?

“And in Israel, Pruitt was scheduled to unveil an agreement with Water-Gen, an Israeli water purification company championed by Adelson. Adelson does not have a financial stake in Water-Gen, according to his aides and the company, but was impressed by its technology and had urged Pruitt to meet with Water-Gen executives soon after he took office. That meeting took place on March 29, 2017.

Within weeks, Pruitt instructed his aides to find a way to procure Water-Gen’s technology, according to two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The EPA signed an agreement with the company in January; Pruitt had hoped to announce it while he was in Israel. Water-Gen is now working with EPA technical staff in Cincinnati to test its technology in hopes of obtaining a federal contract to provide drinking water in places where the water supply has been contaminated.”

Archives

Archives

Battle Born

4TH ST8

"Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact ... Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures. the requisite thing is, that he have a tongue which others will listen to ... Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant."